I thought this short video was a perfect counter point to, or maybe extension, of yesterday’s post – and comments! – about beauty. Chris Heuertz has spent his life working with the poorest of the poor and, most recently, working with children, women, and men who have been caught up in and abused by human trafficking. You can read more about him and his work at Word Made Flesh and on his blog – great title, btw – If I Blogged…. But he’s not just about advocacy or even help. He’s mostly about community, about living with and helping people fashion resilient communities that have weathered the difficult moments that any real...

Beauty, the say, is in the eye of the beholder. But while this is often used to capture our perplexity when someone else falls in love with someone or something we don’t similarly appreciate, it might also work in reverse. That is, we might have occasion to wonder why so many people have a hard time imagining they are beautiful. Last year I posted Dove’s expose on what it takes to make the women in ads appear so strikingly – and as it turns out, unrealistically – beautiful. This spring they have followed up with another ad about the challenges women have in seeing themselves as beautiful. The concept and outcome are both creative and...

Okay, so this has next to nothing to do with “where faith meets life.” But I still thought it was really cool and, well, it’s Friday, so why not? I grew up playing soccer so am a huge fan of Ronaldinho’s nearly inconceivable skills as a player. He is one of the finest to have ever graced the pitch. And, I have to admit that ever since I first saw a flip work as a kid – a kid totally used to TV – I’ve been kind of amazed by them. Not to mention that I’m in utter awe of the amount of time and care it must taken the artist who goes by the name Etoilec to put these flip books together. So…incredibly human artistry on the...

I found the following video fascinating. It’s not that the content is all that incredible – it’s essentially a simple retelling of the story of Jesus’ encounter with Mary and Martha followed by a brief interpretation of why this story is important to the narrator. Rather, it’s the very fact that a popular “secular” (not my favorite term, but…) author uses the story at all, let alone to good effect. Gretchen Rubin is the author of The Happiness Project and it’s follow-up Happier at Home, both of which are geared toward helping people discover and lay hold of practices that will make them – you guessed it – happier. On...